How many votes did the failure of 'Project Orca' cost the GOP?

Well, this is incredibly disturbing. And while I don't think you can place the blame for Romney's defeat on this massive screw up in their GOTV efforts, considering the margin of defeat in OH, FL, VA, and CO, it certainly didn't help.John at Ace of Spades was one of 30,000 volunteers who were to take part in a brand new, high tech program that digitized "strike lists." Basically, the volunteer would be at a polling station and strike off the names of voters as they voted. Then, about half way through the day, they were supposed to send those lists to Boston so that calls could go out to people who hadn't voted yet.

Read the entire post for the maddening screwups that resulted from poor planning and unreasonable expectations of how "Project Orca" would work:

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like "Has this been stress tested?", "Is there redundancy in place?" and "What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?", among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

[...]

At 6:30AM on Tuesday, I went to the polls. I was immediately turned away because I didn't have my poll watcher certificate. Many, many people had this problem. The impression I got was this was taken care of because they had "registered me". Others were as well. But apparently, I was supposed to go on my own to a Victory Center to pick it up, but that was never communicated properly. Outside of the technical problems, this was the single biggest failure of the operation. They simply didn't inform people that this was a requirement.

John says the entire system crashed by 4:00 PM which means tens of thousands of potential voters never got a call to go vote. Many of those people probably voted anyway, but in an election where every single vote mattered, this kind of clusterfark should have been avoided.

Well, this is incredibly disturbing. And while I don't think you can place the blame for Romney's defeat on this massive screw up in their GOTV efforts, considering the margin of defeat in OH, FL, VA, and CO, it certainly didn't help.

John at Ace of Spades was one of 30,000 volunteers who were to take part in a brand new, high tech program that digitized "strike lists." Basically, the volunteer would be at a polling station and strike off the names of voters as they voted. Then, about half way through the day, they were supposed to send those lists to Boston so that calls could go out to people who hadn't voted yet.

Read the entire post for the maddening screwups that resulted from poor planning and unreasonable expectations of how "Project Orca" would work:

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like "Has this been stress tested?", "Is there redundancy in place?" and "What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?", among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

[...]

At 6:30AM on Tuesday, I went to the polls. I was immediately turned away because I didn't have my poll watcher certificate. Many, many people had this problem. The impression I got was this was taken care of because they had "registered me". Others were as well. But apparently, I was supposed to go on my own to a Victory Center to pick it up, but that was never communicated properly. Outside of the technical problems, this was the single biggest failure of the operation. They simply didn't inform people that this was a requirement.

John says the entire system crashed by 4:00 PM which means tens of thousands of potential voters never got a call to go vote. Many of those people probably voted anyway, but in an election where every single vote mattered, this kind of clusterfark should have been avoided.